


Throw Me a Funeral for the Rot of the World

by same_menz_new_cult



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Bellamione Cult Discord Game, Discord: Bellamione Cult, F/F, Horror
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-04-27
Updated: 2019-05-11
Packaged: 2020-02-08 14:38:22
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,485
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18625279
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/same_menz_new_cult/pseuds/same_menz_new_cult
Summary: Hermione is an intrepid young journalist convinced her scoop on the worlds' most renowned and reviled creator of cult horror films has become a scoop about a conspiracy, a cover-up, and possibly even murder. Presented with the chance to interview his favored star, now reclusive and long since fallen from grace, she jumps in head-first.She really ought to have looked before she leaped.





	1. i.

**Author's Note:**

> challenge prompt: horror movies

"Don't be nervous," Ron cautioned her, pausing before the lift to mop sweat off his brow. "By now, she's had her drug boy and her booze boy drop by, so she's conked."

"For how long?" Hermione asked him.

"Till you get loud. Sent a whole work crew up a couple weeks back."

She'd been lucky, finding out an old friend from primary school worked in this of all apartment buildings in town. It was in the once-nice part of town, now trending sharply towards forgotten and falling farther and farther from its glory days. It had an ice cream parlor on the ground floor. And a mad darling of niche horror on the eleventh.

"Had to fix some busted filtration. She sat straight up like a zombie and started rattling off talking to her dead husband. Accused the poor sod of treason, of all things. Still wasn't really lucid and he banged around in there for a good couple hours. Just gotta be careful where you put yourself." The elevator doors clattered open again. "She's faster than she looks if she does snap outta it."

Hermione stopped to see if he was joking, but he was already off down the hallway, flipping a swipe card up into the air and catching it with every third step. She hurried after him, clutching her notepad tight against her chest.

"If she goes wacko, there's an emergency buzzer by the lightswitch in every room."

Hermione blanched as a green light clicked on beside the brass knocker. The plaque on the door read 1139. "What kind of emergency?"

He shrugged. "She bit a pizza guy. Then she tried to light up the shrink they sent her with the syngas hose. Her family's got mad cash, but they had to come up with something or the last proprietor was gonna give her the boot."

He twisted down the handle, pushing the door open a crack. She flinched when it hit the chain and stuck, but Ron shoved his fingers through the narrow opening and unlatched it expertly from the inside, kicking it wide with the toe of his loafers. "Yeah. Be careful, 'Mione. And try not to touch stuff. She gets real edgy if her things aren't where she left 'em."

"Anything else?" Hermione asked, dreading the answer.

He shrugged. "Good luck. Stop by for ice cream when you finish up." Then he backed up with a two-fingered salute and turned to head for the elevator they'd left behind.

Hermione slipped inside.

The only sound was a faint electric hum from an unidentifiable source. She fumbled for a switch. A single bulb flickered on with a pop. There was a laundry room to the right which smelled strongly of fabric softener, heaps of gauzy black fabric and silk nightwear atop the dryer, heavier things strewn across the floor, spilling into the hall. She stepped on something leathery. Its laces tangled up around her trainers, tugging at her as she moved forward into the flat.

She cracked the next door, staring blindly down a second unlit hall.

At the very end, she could see an inch and a half of light.

"Sleeps with her lights on?" Hermione whispered to herself, feeling a strange and sudden wash of pity for this woman, locked up in this dark hole.

She was tempted by the dark doorways on either side, but decided to reach her target first, snoop later. She'd been in the Riddle death-spiral for months now, and this was the closest she was likely to get to the man whose films had defined a generation of nightmares, and whose epithets ranged from 'shadowmaster' to "visionary" to "The Dark Lord."

She had never watched one, herself. Had heard the whispers and screams behind other doors at Uni where film buffs, art snobs, and good old fashion goths had set up white-sheet screenings of his banned Horcrux chronicles, the ones passed only direct from dark web to disc, the ones from after he'd been blacklisted by the MPAA after the copy-cat crimes from his last X-rated special release,  _The Death Eaters._  Back then, she hadn't cared.

Until the killings started up again, and her good friend Harry had turned up on her doorstep, claiming Riddle himself was to blame.

The last door swung wide at her touch.

But Riddle was locked away in the manor he had built, the place he had staged his nightmares, and most of the people who had worked with, for, or near him...

Were unwilling, unable, or unliving to talk.

Outside the bedroom, Hermione stopped and stared at decayed royal splendor unlike anything she had seen before.

From the edges, she seemed almost to have stepped into a stagnant greenhouse; pots of dirt with unidentifiable and largely dead greenery sprouting from them ringed the room, the rose-patterned wallpaper behind lending their carnage an illusion of life. Botrytis spotted the peeling paper leaves and rotting stems alike, the gray mold flecking the air like a kiss of ash. There was a stench of bleach and thick perfume, as though an attempt had been made to kill the mildew and bury its corpse, but had failed. A crooked chandelier with only three flickering electric candles lit the room from above. Strange stuffed animals peeked out from behind terra cotta potting dishes and overstuffed ottomans—the nearest, a dirty yellow bear by Hermione's foot, appeared to have had half of its face melted off. Vases perched on several low tables and ottomans alike, fake roses adding to the illusion that something still lived, here. Deep in the furthest shadows stood a large, curtained bed. The spidery lace—crimson and rose-patterned—was drawn to either side and tied off with velvet sashes. At the center of the mattress lay a figure stretched flat on her back, eyes open, staring up into nothing.

Bellatrix Black. _His last, best lieutenant._

She had surprising... presence, thought Hermione. Full-figured, eerily pale, with dark, light-swallowing curls splayed across her pillows. The open eyes, however, were those of a ghost. No one was home.

She tiptoed across the threshold. Thick, discomfortingly-textured carpet squished silently below her feet. The table closest to the bed was cluttered with orange pill cases and tiny bottles, one half filled with a strange neon-green liquid, and an ashtray with no sign of nicotine products—just a heap of charred matches.

Peeking out from beneath the bedskirt was the butt-end of a red fire extinguisher.

Her pupils didn't move as Hermione approached. There was something haunting in that; her pristine immobility. A flicker of guilt twisted her stomach. From all she knew of Tom Riddle and those who had been dragged into his rotten world, this woman could not have emerged unscathed.

"Ms. Black?" she whispered.

_She didn't blink._

Hermione palmed the nearest pill-bottle. Barbiturates. A gaudy, sloppy hand had scrawled "living death" across the label in green, shimmery ink.

She wandered towards a free-standing wardrobe. Popping open the doors with the tug of a yielding magnetic lock, she jumped as a rain of papers bled down from the inside, cascading across the floor.

She tried to push the mountain of envelopes and folded pages back in, but paused as she started seeing the words in her hands. "'Precious, perfect Penny,'" she read softly. Penny, Bellatrix Black's earliest role for Riddle at the ripe age of thirteen, in  _What Dwells Beneath._ "'And you are, Penny, for you gave her life, and for doing so, may I say I am your greatest, most devoted fan.'"

They were all very much alike. Heaps upon heaps of missives from distant corners of the globe and long-passed decades. Several included confessions of murder. Others, proposals of marriage. One claimed to have given birth to her child.

Behind the letters (which Hermione gave up all hope of replacing) hung nine black garment bags, zipped tight from bottom to hanger. Tugging open the first, Hermione blinked at the two-toned gray jumpsuit Bellatrix wore in  _Prison of Souls._  In the next, she found the same, this one spotted and stiff, as though from the scene where she stands in the broken wall of her cell, being sprayed by the sea. In the third, the jumpsuit bore patches of crusty brown. Hermione touched one with the tip of two fingers. The blood felt, and looked, convincingly real.

From her research, she knew what scene had necessitated it, and did not care to dwell upon it too long. Over the course of  _Prison_ , the unnamed woman, called only by her cell number, 93, is both victim and villain, and nothing she does, nothing which is done to her, bears discussion in polite company.

Hermione slipped a few letters between the cardboard backing of her notebook and the rest of the pages and jotted down a note about the bags. She shut the wardrobe doors as best she could and shoved the worst of the lingering letters between its curved, clawed feet.

As she turned back towards the center of the room, however, she froze.

_The bed was empty._

The corpse-like sleeper was no longer there. The crimson sheet lay bunched against the wall.

"Ms. Black?"

Silence.

Fuck.


	2. ii

She had to be somewhere. Ron had said,  _no, promised,_ she never left the apartment. Everything came to her. That had made her hard to find, but had made it easy, once found, to get in.

Hermione peered under the bedskirt: Nothing but the rest of the fire extinguisher. She circled the room and pushed aside brittle stems, hating the feeling of them snapping and flaking in her hands. She hurried back through the door into the hallway: still dark. She checked the laundry. Empty. Even opened up the dryer, flinching at the loud, metallic clang as its door swung against the plaster. The clothes inside were humid, still warm and damp, but clean. 

Back in the hallway, she tried the first door. 

In the dim light from the distant entrance, she found a bathroom. It was ornate and untidy, bottles and brushes and robes strewn on counters, tub rim, and radiator, but no sign of life. The second door opened onto an equally gaudy and strange living room, all shadow-lumps of heavy furniture and dusty frames hung on peeling walls. The dust swirled only around her; the rest of the room was still.

Then, in the reflection of the dull portrait glass, she spotted a flash, a shadow  _right_  behind her, a jerk of movement across the open doorway. She spun around.

"Ms. Black?" Her voice was thin. "Please, don't be alarmed! I've just come with a few questions."

Stepping into the hall, she approached the final unexplored doorway, now a hand's-width open. She tapped it gently with two fingers, not hard enough to knock, not hard enough to push it wider, either. Sucking in a breath, she flattened her palm and pushed. As she stepped through, it banged sideways, a dark-draped figure whose pale skin all but glowed in the backlight collapsing down from a tabletop in a rush of curls and lunging towards her, a glint of silver in her hand.

Hermione shrieked and fell backwards through the door, the knife plunging down beside her skull and embedding itself five-inches deep in the floor. On instinct alone, Hermione's arms shot out, smacking the woman full in the face with the back of her notebook. She grunted and slumped to the side, clutching her nose with both hands, her eyes rolling with more white than Hermione thought human.

"Please!" she gasped out. "I mean, please listen, I didn't mean to hurt you!"

Groping wildly behind her as she struggled to her feet, she found the lightswitch. The kitchen overheads were florescent and blinding after the old-fashioned and dusty amber bulbs of the other rooms.

Bellatrix immediately clenched in on herself, burying her face in her knees like a vent-creature pulled up from the deep. Two layers of black silk robes wrapped around her, the outer untied and pooled about her limbs. "Shut it off," she said in a low, rasping voice.  _"Off!"_

Hermione felt a chill race down her spine. She'd heard the voice. Watched clips on the fan-sites in her research. Had even seen one of her  _other_  films, one of the only two she had made in the time A.R. (After Riddle.) She looked different, now. Older. Worn. But that voice was exactly the same.

"Like someone started feeding a child cigars for breakfast," wrote Rita Skeeter in an early review of _What Dwells Beneath_. "Don't ever let her finish growing up."

It had been a common (and disturbing, thought Hermione) refrain when she'd first been discovered. An uncanny teenage star undertaking stomach-churning themes in very, very adult movies of the darkest, sickest kind. But it was also true: it was a voice that turned heads and hearts and hands clutching ticket-stubs. Smoked honey and twisted innocence. After all these years, very much the same.

Gripping her notebook so tight she could feel the paper thin and tear, Hermione turned off the lights. She pushed the door to the hall wider so she could still see in the dim orange glow and rested a thumb pointedly over the panic button beside the light.

The weaker light softened her. Hermione found herself staring in something like awe. It was fame, before her. The proud, sharp cheekbones, the pristine skin, the daring jut of that Black family nose. While her home was a palace in ruins, Bellatrix Black was a statue removed from time in all but the ink-dark smears beneath her eyes and the fine lines that surrounded them.

And the feral gleam in their depths.

Hermione had the wild thought that this was a creature who had been devoured by her own beauty until that was all that was left.

"Come here to kill me, pet?" Bellatrix breathed with a vacant, gleeful smile. It looked staged. Posed. As though waiting for Hermione to snap her picture.

"No," Hermione said, struck calm by sheer adrenaline. "Mind if I sit?"

Without warning, the woman began to cackle aloud. "Mind, mind, mind," she sang quietly, then laughed again. "If it's not past midnight, mind where it may."

Hermione decided that was a yes. She drew herself up onto a barstool-high chair. "I'm here to ask you about Riddle."

 _"Riddle."_ She said it feverishly, as though she had been waiting for the kiss of it upon her lips in a thousand year slumber. "Been popping up dead things like daisies around him again," she said all in a rush.

"What do you know about it?" asked Hermione with eager surprise, leaning forward in her chair. If Bellatrix Black knew what had been going on outside her flat enough to know there were killings again, surely the world did not have as clear a picture of her lucidity as she'd thought.

"Doomed from the start," she murmured.

"Excuse me?"

Hermione wanted to slap herself the same second she asked. She shouldn't have interrupted. Now Bellatrix's eyes were on her with the same sharpness as the knife she'd embedded in the floor.

"This must be Chatterbox, then. An easy favorite first to die. You weren't cast for brains or beauty, were you, girl? No, you're here to speak when no one wants to hear you, and then to bleed. The audience will shriek as you perish, then sigh with relief at your  _silence._ Unless." She leaned forward, an odd, discomforting motion for a woman in half-recline upon a cold kitchen floor. "You decide to fuck your way up. Chatterbox can be a Scream Queen, now and again. Either way." She rolled up onto her knees with easy, haunting grace. "No  _trope_  will come into  _my own home_  and demand to know about  _Tom. Riddle._ " She scoffed. "And so a corpse lies on its back in the mud and thinks its coffin holds constellations, if only the clouds would clear."

"I'm not buying it," Hermione said, laser-focused on the mention of murder. "The crazy actress... act."

She laughed again, the sound like sandpaper against glass, both grating and musical. "Now isn't that a pretty little paradox."

Frustrated, Hermione kicked her heel against the support slat connecting her chair legs. "I'll be here until I have some answers. The Riddle killings. What do you know?"

Bellatrix stood, all at once straight-spined and a full, intimidating height. "Haven't you heard, chatterbox? I've nothing to say to you."

"Except you just—"

"Ze-ro! _Rien du tout!_  Jaunt down the river  _nein_."

"You know something. Several things, I'd bet." Hermione pointedly flipped a page of her notepad, though she'd written nothing on it since she'd found the costumes back in the bedroom.

Bellatrix's eyes tracked the movement. Her spout of nonsense faltered for a moment and she licked her lips. "Will you kill me if I don't tell you?" she breathed, then sank her lips into a full, sultry pout coupled with wide, pleading eyes. "Oh, won't you? At last, I'll flock to my final headlines:  _Death of Daughter Death, Penny's Final Prayers_. Send me out with a murder, won't you? I'll eclipse the rest, the lot of them. Riddle killings, poof! I've a secret for you, girl."

She stepped closer. A chill stole up Hermione's spine and dragged sharp nails back down again, every hair standing on end as Bellatrix Black leaned in to whisper in her ear. The sense of conspiracy had her meeting the lean halfway, unable to resist even as hot breath dampened the curve of her ear. 

_"They don't matter."_

"What is the matter with you!" Hermione gasped, all but tipping backwards in her haste to get out of the chair.

She stormed towards the doorway and slammed on the light switch, thinking of nothing but escaping the ice that had lodged itself between every vertebra.

Bellatrix jerked as though electrocuted, slumping against the tabletop with a horrible sound.

 _Fuck_ , thought Hermione, plunging them back into darkness.

Bellatrix lay like an injured animal, the sounds in the back of her throat striking Hermione with a wave of guilt and horror as she realized they were whimpers, almost tiny little moans.

"Sorry," Hermione said. "Sorry. I— I didn't mean to— Can, can I get you something?"

In a single blink of her eyes, the whimpering stopped. Her chin rose, eyes spearing Hermione again. "Oh, yes, pet. There's... a little green tincture beside my bed." Her neck twisted, straining towards that part of the hallway. "You know where that is. Fetch it for me, won't you, doll?"

Equal parts reluctant and eager to flee, Hermione backed out of the room. When she returned, acid-colored drink in hand, Bellatrix sat upon the chair she'd vacated. She held out a black-nailed hand, the polish chipped about the edges, five ragged ridges of mica. Hermione hesitated. "Are you sure you should be drinking... this? You don't want water, or-or tea—"

Bellatrix rolled her eyes and snatched it from her grip. "I though you were here to ask questions. I've several weekly visitors riding me hard about  _hydration_  already, girl."

She downed the toxic slick like a shot and licked her lips.

Hermione clung to a growing suspicion that Bellatrix Black was not, in fact, actively taking the mess of pills beside her bed, doing her best to assuage worry or guilt that this drink might mix poorly with them. She was in and out of nonsense-speak, but Hermione was all but convinced it was the seconds of clarity between that were the truest picture of the former star. She wasn't sure what the rest was.

For all the show she'd put on, there was a glint in her once-dead eyes that seemed to say  _You're my audience now, girl._

Hermione suspected she was enjoying having one again. She suspected it had been... a while. 

Her porcelain-white fingers clutched the empty bottle with a dull clink, and Hermione spotted a silver ring wrapped about her middle finger, set with a heavy green stone.

From several exhaustive nights reading ancient tabloids, Hermione knew it was an old engagement ring, given by her once-fiancé, Rodolphus Lestrange.

The day before his tragic accident and her last day on a Riddle set.

She set the glass on the tabletop and began to roll it back and forth beneath her palm, the ring ticking against it with every push and pull. After swallowing the draught, she appeared exceptionally present, relaxed against the metal seat-back and sharply focused on Hermione's hands where they clutched her pen and paper. "So you want to know about Riddle, chatterbox."

"Yes," said Hermione, ignoring the denigrating nickname she'd hardly earned.

"You  _sure_ , pet? Some stones."

She said it leadingly, promptingly, as though Hermione should know exactly what she meant. "Some stones?"

A mean, shockingly pretty smirk turned up the corner of Bellatrix's lips. "Best left unturned. Tell me, what do you know about the Manor?"


End file.
